Made in China

Well there’s a lot to catch you up on, given that we’ve been slacking in our posting lately. The whirlwind travel we’ve been taking has finally caught up to us, with Edie coming down with her first cold and Laura following to the sick ward soon after.

So what have we been up to? After our Vietnam experience we laid low for about a month, after which I left for China to attend the 9th Internat. Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant. And it truly was an international event, with attendees from over 40 countries, including many that are often poorly represented at these types of meetings such as eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and southern Africa.

It was easy to be impressed with the Chinese eagerness to please their international visitors, as this conference could be considered a microcosm of the spectacle that was the Beijing Olympics. We attended banquets and rock concerts, dances and acrobatics shows.
Near the conference venue, every door was opened for us by smiling staff, when it was raining we were escorted under umbrellas across the parking lot, and our hotel rooms were cleaned every time we left them (not just the standard once a day). The Chinese certainly do possess people power.

After the confidence we gained from our Vietnam trip, I ate most of my meals on the street.
Typical cost was about 5-10 yuan (1-2 Australian dollars) for excellent food that included fried rice, pancakes, fried dough and of course the ubiquitous and delicious dumplings. Coincidentally, one meal I had was a kebab in a small market of Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, the same ethnic group that was recently in the news after Bermuda accepted former Uighur prisoners that were moved from Guantanamo Bay.


The best part of each day was early in the morning and late in the afternoon, when the throngs of schoolchildren would be on their way to and from their day’s lessons. Often accompanied by grandmothers, they appeared very cheery and in general are very adorable.

English is spoken very little in that part of China, but every so often I would hear someone call “Hullo!” and turn around to see giggling youngsters. It was all very endearing.

So my impression of China probably sounds pretty positive, and it’s fair to say that it was. However there were a couple of things that I must note to give a more balanced view. First of all, I was unable to access certain websites while I was there – namely this blog that you are reading. It was a gentle reminder that the Say Anything culture that we take for granted has not yet caught up to China, and information does not flow as freely as we hope that it would there and in other parts of the globe, a point driven home by recent events in Iran. No doubt there are ways around it, mobile phone cameras being one of them, but the authorities make you work for it, and there are risks involved in defying Big Brother.

The 2nd low point came from my visit to a park that contained a zoo.
The park was fascinating, mainly because it was less National Park and more Amusement Park. There was a Chinese rock band singing Bon Jovi on stage, and I got to see a macacque running wild, the first time I’ve seen a primate outside of captivity.
However, the zoo portion was depressing, with sad looking animals in bare concrete cages. Although my prejudice towards zoos was tempered after reading “Life of Pi” a few years ago, this was clearly an example of animals being used solely for the amusement of humans. Because I remain a meat eater, I have a very tenuous position when it comes to promoting animal welfare; I am aware of the hypocrisy of simultaneously being an animal lover and a carnivore. However, eating is at least a little more necessary than entertainment, and we try our best to buy meat from animals that were raised in humanitarian conditions. The Chinese have a very utilitarian view of animals, as noted repeatedly in Theroux’s book “Riding the Iron Rooster” and will cage and eat just about any animal, including the small and the rare. Is it cruelty? Perhaps. Certainly PETA would have more to work on there than they do in North America, where a President swatting a fly draws their ire.

Guizhou Province, where the conference was held, has the lowest GDP per capita of the 32 Chinese provinces, with a value (around $1,500) that places it on par with the African country of Djibouti. Yet there was plenty of evidence of wealth in the city. The main mode of transportation was the car (unlike the thousands of motorbikes we saw in Hanoi).
On the main strip downtown there were plenty of malls selling expensive Western goods – many of them made in China of course! And the hotels and higher-end restaurants have prices that are typical of Western cities ($100 per night, $10 for breakfast, etc.). So to balance out all this wealth, there is clearly a large number of Chinese that remain very poor in this province and elsewhere in the country. In the case of Guizhou Province, this would be the large number of gold and mercury miners – the reason we were here for the conference in the first place. In some instances the waste from these mines is used to irrigate rice crops and serves as a route of exposure to mercury, which in turn can cause health defects. In fact, small-scale gold mining is one of the major sources of mercury toxicity in humans worldwide (mercury is used to amalgamate the gold from the extracted ore and then burned off in gold shops), and gold mining areas are typically found in the poorest places – China, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Ghana, and rural Brazil to name a few. With China’s growing wealth comes the challenge of maintaining a healthy environment, something North America and Europe overlooked during their own rapid development stages. You only need to spend time in a few Asian cities and experience the smog to realize that human health may be compromised by industrial development. In China’s case, the more prosperous areas are on the threshold of being wealthy enough to exercise some pollution control, and are often seeking the advice of foreigners, including my supervisor here in Australia, to achieve these goals.

On the topic of Chinese development, my favourite picture from the trip is below.
It’s a WalMart superstore that’s built in an old bomb shelter – completely underground. If you look closely to the right, you can see a statue of the well-known communist leader Mao Zedong in the background. Nothing captures the tumultuous history of modern China than this photo, the conflict between the desire to maintain old Chinese ideals of isolationism and the emerging need to connect with the Western world. No doubt Mao is turning over in his grave right now. If communism/socialism is what it says it is, then as China continues to develop it should become a shining example of how a prosperous nation can effectively distribute wealth across the entire spectrum of its population. Somehow I doubt this will happen, as already an economic class structure is apparent. Those who are well connected are likely becoming fabulously wealthy, while the miners and peasants continue to toil.